Police and firefighters in Pullman, Wash., are investigating two suspicious fires that have raged through community centers in apartment complexes on Washington State University’s campus during the past week, reports KTVB, a television station in Boise, Id. No one was hurt in either of the fires, the first of which happened Tuesday and the second of which broke out early Saturday morning. But both of the community-center buildings were destroyed.

A new $2-billion radio telescope described as the world’s most powerful will be split among sites in South Africa and in Australia and New Zealand, according to the international association that has been raising money for the project. The instrument, known as the Square Kilometre Array, will take advantage of already-constructed antennae in locations in western Australia and New Zealand, as well as a new network of facilities stretching from South Africa to Ghana, reports the Johannesburg newspaper The Times. But The Sydney Morning Herald says some astronomers are worried that splitting the site could end up creating additional risks for the project once the initial phase is complete. The full telescope, which is expected to be online in 2024, is designed to be 50 times more sensitive than current instruments.

A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that the Chicago Tribune’s lawsuit to gain access to student records from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had no business being adjudicated in federal court. Instead, the court ruled, the case belongs in state court because the newspaper’s claims to view the student records—part of its investigation into political corruption in university admissions— “arises under Illinois law,” not federal law.

The decision, by a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, reverses a district court’s ruling last year that said federal student-privacy law did not forbid the university to provide the records to the Tribune. That 2011 ruling unnerved college officials, who had long assumed that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, the main federal student-privacy law, prohibited such…

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Graham B. Spanier, the former president of Pennsylvania State University, filed suit on Friday to force the institution to turn over to him e-mail messages related to its internal investigation of the much-publicized child-sex-abuse scandal that rocked the University Park campus last fall, the Centre Daily Times reported. Mr. Spanier was fired in November amid a firestorm of criticism over his response to the scandal, which centered on allegations of rape against Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach under the revered head coach Joe Paterno, who was also fired.

After dismissing Mr. Spanier, the university’s Board of Trustees hired Louis J. Freeh, the former FBI director, to investigate Penn State’s handling of the case. In his lawsuit, Mr. Spanier says he asked the university to turn over e-mail messages—dated from 1998 to 2004—that were relevant to the Freeh…

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Michael V. Martin, chancellor of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, will become chancellor of the Colorado State University system, he announced on Friday. As Colorado State’s chancellor, Mr. Martin will oversee three campuses with an overall enrollment of about 37,000. His five-year contract will include a base salary of $375,000 with potential incentive payments of $50,000 annually.

Mr. Martin will succeed Joseph Blake, who stepped down in December. He plans to stay on at Louisiana State until August, to see the university into the start of a new budget year. Mr. Martin is the second top official to leave Louisiana State in the last month. John V. Lombardi, the LSU system’s president, was fired in late April amid disputes about campus governance, among other things.

Seeking to quell controversy on campuses and in China, the U.S. Department of State has reissued a policy directive on Confucius Institutes, largely reversing guidance it put out last week. The department had reaped criticism and confusion after it said that all Chinese schoolteachers sponsored by the university-based language and cultural centers would have to leave the United States by the end of June because of visa problems, a move that Chinese officials said would “harm” Sino-American exchanges.

The original directive, first reported in The Chronicle, also stated that the institutes would have to be associated with university foreign-language departments or gain separate accreditation. The revised memorandum states that university accreditation is sufficient and that the precollege teachers will not have to leave the country. It asks host universities to contact the State…

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Angelo Armenti Jr., the longtime president of California University of Pennsylvania who was fired last week, has reached an agreement with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education that will give him through Saturday to remove personal items from his sealed university office. State officials had previously told Mr. Armenti to vacate his office by Wednesday, but the former president obtained a temporary injunction blocking that demand. A court hearing was planned for Friday before the two sides settled.

The deal does not affect a formal complaint Mr. Armenti filed against the Pennsylvania system’s chancellor before he was fired. In that grievance, he accuses state officials of working with complicit newspapers to “denigrate my achievements, undermine my effectiveness, diminish my authority, attack my credibility, and damage my reputation.”

A California lawmaker has proposed restricting the ranks of international and out-of-state students who attend institutions in the University of California system, but his plan is already drawing fire from university officials. The California Students First Act would require that nonresidents make up no more than 10 percent of each campus’s freshman class, The New York Times reports.

Michael J. Rubio, a Democrat in the State Senate who is sponsoring the measure, said it would reverse “a disturbing trend of UC’s recruiting unprecedented numbers of out-of-state students over in-state students.” That trend has mounted as state support for public higher education has declined and universities have seen nonresident students, who pay higher tuition, as new sources of revenue.

Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley—where nonresident enrollment…

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The University of Montana system’s Board of Regents said on Thursday that it had ordered an investigation into the university’s handling of 11 sexual-assault complaints, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported. As part of the investigation, two lawyers in the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education—the board’s administrative arm—will review e-mail messages in which five university officials discussed the assault charges. Those officials include James P. Foley, the university’s executive vice president, who asked in one message whether a female student could be found to have violated the university’s code of conduct for publicly discussing allegations that she was raped. Mr. Foley’s inquiry, first reported last weekend by The Missoulian, ignited new criticism of the university, which is already under investigation for “a gap in reporting sexual assaults.”